Some jottings towards a review
If you have any thoughts about what you would say or ask about this book, especially for Reformed Evangelical Anglican pastors, I'd really welcome them, please
I could have typed out much more of this book!
In addition to what I've scribbled in the margins:
Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
Paul Kingsnorth
Penguin / Particular Books,
2025 (ISBN: 9780241788400 hb, 348pp)
Written not exclusively
for a Bible-believing Christian audience
Not on the surface
entirely or straightforwardly a theological book, but in fact profoundly so
since it is about what ultimately matters to us and how we should then live.
Kingsnorth sees our problems and their solutions as in the end spiritual and
related to God and the so-called / demonic gods. He calls us to the rebellion
of true worship in a nihilistic self-loving world (314).
As far as I can see, Carl
Trueman is the only Reformed writer cited.
At times this felt like a mark-every-paragraph
sort of a book, though I imagine few readers will agree with everything. Kingsnorth
notes that some will find some of the ideas controversial, others incomprehensible
(313). I cried on page two. Kingsnorth likes Tolkien and R. S. Thomas. He has
thrown away his TV and moved to the West of Ireland where he homeschools the
kids. He thinks the West has gone wrong in old, deep, interesting ways to do
with technology, the economy, the earth and the soul.
Kingsnorth can write. In
addition to his journalism, his non-fiction was cited by David Cameron and the
Archbishop of Canterbury. His fiction was Booker long-listed.
At turns prophetic and
poetic. Moving.
Unlikely to agree with
everything here
Kingsnorth has been on a
journey via environmental activism, Wicca and Buddhism to the Romanian Orthodox
church.
Kingsnorth speaks rather
sadly of giving in and buying a mower chapter. If he really means that no
technology has saved us time or effort, I think that is obviously wrong. But it
is true that we are still busy. And we don’t always use that technology well.
Email is brilliant, but there were some positives about the effort, delay and
locatedness of the letter.
Homeschooling his children
in rural Ireland where he draws water from his own well
Creation and fall
the vision of "The
Machine" (a kind of technology-capitalism alliance against humanity) is to
liberate "all potential birthing-persons, to spend more time at work,
lovingly nurturing economic growth." (Against the Machine, p112)
Dominion – technology /
magic – Faustian – control which fails to trust God
The English lack a shared
knowledge of folk songs. And their national costume, the pin striped suit and
the bowler hat, suggests the worship of Mammon. We have forgotten where we are
from, or we hate it. The white working class are despised as bigots and
racists. Our high culture is one of negation (we are against white straight
males and Christianity). We want to topple the statues, but we don’t know what
to put in their place. We certainly wouldn’t look to the cathedral for
inspiration, which is why we could not build a cathedral, only another glass
sky-scraper.
Our culture is adolescent
and locked in rebellion, refusing to grow towards adult maturity and become
parents.
Supposed liberation but
also control. You can shake off all traditional constraints, but you must scan
the QR code.
Human beings as inherently
religious and if we reject the true God we make idols for ourselves
4 Ps which underpin
traditional culture
People
Place
Prayer
The past
4 Ss with which Machine
ideology would like to replace them
Sex
Science
Self
screen
Much of the book is given
over to tracing the origin and nature of the machine which is seen as an
alliance of technology and capitalism. The machine is tied up with money. It is
Molech and demands human sacrifice. It is Antichrist. Sciencism denying
anything immaterial or transcendent. Totalitarian. The nation state has been
largely co-opted into this global vision.
We might quibble about the
notion that the Reformation was (unwittingly?) responsible for desacralizing
the world. Or that monasticism might have saved a sense of the transcendent.
Draws on the work of Ian McGilcrist
who calls this “the most powerful and important book I have read in years.
Simply brilliant” (back cover)
Reactionary radicalism (ch
24)
A moral economy on a human
scale based on a community of place
“A politics which embraces
family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the
outsider….” (284)
The Machine’s programme is
akin to the Enclosures in 19th Century English agriculture. It aims
to replace “self-sufficient moral economies… with a system of dependency and exploitation
which has now gone fully global.” (288)
Kingsnorth advocates
attempting to evade the reach of the state by a “dispersed culture of refusal”
which defends cultural and economic autonomy”. We might choose to live as “barbarians”
building “parallel systems… which are hard to assimilate, and are robust enough
to last.” (293) A few may do this by forming off-grid communities in the hills;
others will “retreat to the margins” (294) in the homes or hearts (295). We may
live “in the Machine but not of it” (295) geographically, psychologically or
spiritually (295-6) becoming conscientious objectors to the Machine (297).
Whether pirates, highwaymen
and outlaws are suitable models? (297)
Kingsnorth is clear that
he would smash the screens and turn off the internet if he could, yet he is
typing these words on a laptop and sharing his essays online.
The soul’s needs for roots
in place, community, past, shared vision of the future
The Machine is “an
external manifestation of an inner hunger” (310)
The modern West has
dedicated itself to uprooting all tradition and has made itself homeless (310)
we have replaced a culture with culture wars (310) but the real warfare is
spiritual for culture, humanity, creation and God
An attachment to hearth
and home without making idols of nations or cultures (312)
Opponents of the modern
machine painted as fossils or fascists (313)
Gary Snyder: “The most radical
thing you can do is stay at home” (314)
Kingsnorth says that in
its own way 60s counter culture attempted some resistance against the military
industrial complex of the Machine but that the ground of extreme personal
liberation proved too swampy to establish an effective lasting alternative (315).
The hippies became the yuppies. “The counter-culture has become the culture,
and everyone is having a bad trip, man.” (315)
A new counter culture
should avoid the mistakes of the past, of seeking a blank slate or a national
utopia. It would seek to be “rooted in eternal things” (315)
Raindance on the
astroturf, call down the powers, offer ourselves up to God (316) even if it
doesn’t work, what’s the alternative?!
Sometimes the ridiculous
and the mad is worth trying, as when two halflings take on the power of the
Ring. The foolishness of the gospel, we might have said
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